Monday, February 7, 2011

Audrey and I went out for Chinese last night with my mom. It wasn't at all to celebrate Chinese New Year, but let's say it was. I'm so glad that the 47-oughts are almost behind us, because this decade has suh-ucked.

The opening of the fortune cookies at the end of a Chinese meal has always been contentious in my family. Really there is nothing that my family cannot make contentious. No matter what my mother's fortune said, my father would always find a way to twist it around to make it negative or something that he could razz her about.

This finally culminated in the great Lang Lee Incident of '89 when my mother could take it no more and burst out with "It doesn't matter what it says, you always say the same thing! It could say 'You are a lumberjack with a hatchet through your head' and you'd say 'That's your mother! THAT. IS. YOUR. MOTHER!'"

This story is a big part of our family lore, right up there with other scrapbook-worthy moments like the time my 8-year old self shot my dresser with a 20-gauge. After that, my mother steadfastly refused to open fortune cookies in my father's presence. Also? They stopped storing their firearms in my bedroom closet.

Since my father passed away, the moratorium on fortune cookies has been lifted. Last night, my mother's fortune read:

As usual, you blew it already. The numbers on your fortune came up last night in the Mega-Super-Jackpot-Lotto Lottery. You didn't play them, did you? Thought so. Oh, well $492,114,012.09 only goes so far any way.

That one is perfect for you!! Fortune cookies are always surprisingly accurate. I think there is a science behind them....has something to do with how many you eat....OK maybe less science, more stats.

Alas, I have moved to a small town where there is no Chinese food delivery, and I don't do Chinese buffet (or any other kinds of buffet for that matter - germ factories!!). I miss fotune cookies! Yours was perfect!! That one definitely needs to be framed or made into t-shirts, or an annoying car bumper sticker. I never get good fortune cookies, just ones where the English translation is so horribly garbled that it is funny.

At least your Dad didn't make fortunes dirty by adding "in bed" at the end. The most horrifying Christmas ever was when someone brought a 5lb (no exaggeration) bag of fortune cookies for dessert. You know, the traditional dessert of our Polish ancestors. Anyway, someone taught innocent, very Catholic, slightly slipping into senility Grandma to say "in bed" after every fortune. She spent the rest of Christmas making dirty fortune cookie related jokes. It was both amusing and horrifying.